


on this blood-dimmed tide

by adenophora



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (SPOILERS from here on out), Angst, Archivist!Martin, Death, End!Jon, Hallucinations, M/M, Sort of? - Freeform, Time Travel, cosmic poetry, the great cosmic wheel turns again, time loops
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29931288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adenophora/pseuds/adenophora
Summary: But Jon knows the Eye is dying. And he knows it knows, too. And there is plenty of room for death, here. It is the certain, suffocating presence that seems to be the only thing left to hold the world together, binding Jon and the Eye as they orbit each other like collapsing stars.--Jon lives to see the world die a second, ugly, insignificant death, smearing towards nonexistence like a fading bruise. And then, he watches it all again.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 5
Kudos: 53





	1. prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just an idea i've had crawling around my head

> "The Second Coming"
> 
> Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
> 
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
> 
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
> 
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
> 
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
> 
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
> 
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
> 
> Are full of passionate intensity.
> 
> Surely some revelation is at hand;
> 
> Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
> 
> The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
> 
> When a vast image out of _Spiritus Mundi_
> 
> Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 
> 
> A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
> 
> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
> 
> Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
> 
> Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
> 
> The darkness drops again; but now I know 
> 
> That twenty centuries of stony sleep
> 
> Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
> 
> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
> 
> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
> 
> William Butler Yeats, 1919

And at some instance, some moment if Jon could remember the measure of such a thing, Jon awakens on the shore where his own consciousness bleeds into what’s left of the universe. He supposes he had known, even in his inertia, that he wasn’t yet dead. He would resurface like a disappointed sigh, long past the passion of agony for his own condition.

He stares out over the tepid, lifeless waves at a pale, dead pupil that hums harmlessly like the murdered sun. Milky and myopic, it is wide, and flat, and cold, and inert. Its languid stare is bland rather than hungry, unsteady where it was once the sharp, focused presence that consumed the world in its insistence to _watch_.

Jon stares until dark spots begin to crowd his sight, and then more until his vision is white with overexposure. The Eye gazes back without power, with something like the sneer of a starved predator toward a creature it once could have called prey.

Jon still does not know if it thinks, if it feels. Elias had once been sure that it was something of a malignant receptacle—an unholy, endless reaction that only knew the causality of observation—but some dull echo of listless amusement hitches briefly in Jon at all the things Elias had once been sure of. Elias had Jon kill the world, and now, as Jon watches it die its after-death, there is room for nothing in Jon for Elias. Not even hate, not even pity. Not even regret. Those things don’t exist anymore; there is nowhere for them to go, not really.

But Jon knows the Eye is dying. And he knows it knows, too. And there is plenty of room for death, here. It is the certain, suffocating presence that seems to be the only thing left to hold the world together, binding Jon and the Eye as they orbit each other like collapsing stars.

Lazily, Jon refocuses his stare, shifting away from the oppressive edges of death back toward the comforting ache of observation. They match each other’s gazes in a bleary, rusted contempt.

Is it possible to outlive the cracked foundation that reality now finds itself held upon? Jon thinks of titans, and gods, and those caught in a fated half-mortality. He thinks of breaking bread in the presence of a savoir. He thinks of hanging a burning flame of hope at its insistence. He thinks of that little needling obsession in existence, some pre-conscious urge of consumption from creation toward creator.

Jon’s gaze has lost its steel, and its bite, but he doesn’t falter. Does it blink? Does it matter?

But Jon understands.

*

For a long time, there is nothing. And before that, there is a fizzle. A weak, pathetic thrust of the universe against entropy.

And even earlier, but after everything else, the sky’s iris streaks over with a particle haze; the pupil gorging itself on its own death. For so long Jon had measured his existence against its own, matching his breathing to its hypnotic subtle pulse. Such actions are useless, and unnecessary, he knows. But it is the only catalog he knows how to grant himself of anything. Left with just himself and the dull gaze of the sky, it turns out there is very little left to know at the end of everything. This is his coronation, he supposes, where knowledge pinnacles and putters out into nothing.

They were the same, in a way; teetering just on the edge of existence, feeding from one another in a folie a deux of mutual, regurgitative auto-cannibalistic parasitism. Sometimes, Jon thinks, they are intertwined entirely, and Jon will gaze down from the sky and stare at the broken shadow of a man on the edge of a dead world. And he will drink in the sight as the arrythmia of the universe stutters everything forward in a slow, hypotonic march toward finality.

And then, a dull, ugly red imposes itself across the sky and against Jon’s being. Its steady expansion suggests a new refrain, and the sky creates its own dirge, a heavy blanket of foretold death that stains Jon’s tired retinas. Jon thinks he might go blind, but maybe there is just also nothing else to see. No difference to hang perception upon.

It consumes him just as it doesn’t, and he burns just as he doesn’t, and in the bloated Eye, there is liquid darkness and icy reflective white, and there is also nothing else. Not even the impression of an existence that ruled over all else for its own finite eternity.

There is a small, desperate stutter in Jon toward something else, something he refuses to name—not anything Jon could have expected but maybe could have understood the faint, muted desire for, even in its impossibility. He shutters on it instantly and is almost granted with the reward of a true novel surprise: that such an impulse had laid buried in him for so long regardless.

Left with just himself, Jon retreats inward, the only place there is anything left, trying to conjure the memory of joy, or heartbreak, or relief, or acceptance, or even fear. Comfort himself with the company of his own emotions, study them like a forced companion.

But in the end, Jon merely feels alone, and he closes his eyes with the gentle acceptance of Terminus, which rolls in a like fog as much as it crashes forth like a wave. It is not without pain, but it has been a long time since Jon has feared anything like pain. There is a bright eternity-moment of too-much-too-little-too-soon-too-late, and then Jon exhales, and the universe gifts itself to the end.

*

And then, somehow, as existence pauses between breaths, it staggers out a half step toward something from nothing and manages to fumble in the right direction. And for all his experience, everything he knows—his singular view at the end of everything—Jon could not describe the knowledge of this sensation. If absence can thrum with the potential of possibility, then Jon feels the way existence crackles itself toward being, and then ruptures as something lurching toward the notion of _something itself_ forms once again. And existence flickers back into itself much in the same way it flickered out, with Jon as its muted witness, as its youngest and oldest companion, as the measure that it marks its own presence against.

Jon breathes, or there is something like a breath, and thinks, or there is something like a thought.

 _Again_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos and comments appreciated


	2. chapter one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> after this chapter, i expect to be publishing more regularly on mondays each week. however, i finished a bit early this week and had an itch to really get the story started. i also just wanted to gauge properly if there's any real interest in the fic

Soon after the world ends, when it becomes clear they can do nothing to restore their now wretched and broken Earth, Jon finds death becomes the only sign of mercy he knows how to grant. Avatars, victims; he watches them in one domain switch out and around and about as an endless loop. The eternal wheel of fate redeployed on the scale of ceaseless cosmic torture. Unable to change it, to touch it, to do _anything_ , Jon can only enact unmaking. Un-existing. The painful kindness of oblivion.

Once, in a manic act of desperate agency—a moment of fevered pain when it became clear how truly alone in the world he was—Jon destroys an entire domain and all its revelers, leeches, and sufferers alike with merely a look. Jon remembers feeling an unforgivable rush of nauseating power—the Eye a gleeful absorbent in his mind and above his head—a disgusting jolt of adrenaline that shot straight through him and made his whole being hum like a charged and liquid lightning. He remembers that moment—its grotesque and gruesome glory—and little else for a very long time.

When he returns to himself—when he is aware of a _self_ once again—Jon is lying on a burnt hill on a cracked scar in the earth with Oliver Banks. Something very powerful, and very ugly, and very wrong happened here. Tried to happen here. And it failed.

For a while, Jon merely stares, caught up in a stunned silence. He remembers Oliver’s death even if he did not witness it, not personally. But the Eye hangs low and heavy in the sky and in his mind to remind him that those sorts of distinctions mean very little to him now. Oliver doesn’t acknowledge his gaze—maybe doesn’t even feel it, as Oliver’s eyes are closed and his breathing even. Asleep?

There is something… beautiful, here. About Oliver’s quiet peace. The other man’s concrete attractiveness accentuates the moment’s beauty rather than creates it, and for a brief moment, Jon loses himself in the study of an image with no fear. No burden.

Still, Jon forces himself to push aside the malformed seed of delight in his chest at just the sight of something familiar. And instead, he pulls the unwanted words from inside his mouth like rotting teeth: “I guess I didn’t really consider what it means. Not really. For an avatar of the End to die. The… latent potentialities.”

“No,” Oliver replies, easy. And something about that makes Jon ache. Eyes still closed, Oliver continues, unhurried, “Something of an oversight, if you ask me.”

Jon huffs, nods his head in agreement and then catches himself. He turns his gaze from Oliver to the sky, before closing his own eyes quickly, trying to avoid the hungry, searching scrutiny that reigns down from above. He even goes so far as to gently place his arm over his closed eyelids, as if blocking out the sun.

“Actually,” Jon admits, “I’m more prone to oversights than one might think.”

Oliver hums lightly in reply but says nothing else. The air somehow feels tranquil between them; there is no pressure to break or linger in the silence.

“It’s like…” Jon grasps around his mind, looking for the explanation that correctly describes the lightning in his bones and the ocean in his brain. The ugly way humanity and eternity collide under his skin. “Well, it’s like. All your memories, every experience locked inside your head. They _might_ be there, right? And you _might_ even know it. But how much of it are you really able to access without a hint, a reminder, some sort of ripple that disturbs your thoughts and reminds you of a memory’s existence merely by knocking it out of place?”

“Scale that up to the knowledge of everything…” Oliver picks up where Jon leaves off, and Jon opens his eyes only to meet Oliver’s. They are a deep, natural brown. And they are also a tired, oblique grey.

“It can become quite the mess,” Jon confirms. “Though, I’m getting better at it. Was. Am?”

“Does it matter?”

Something of the bluntness of Oliver’s reply dazes Jon, gives him a moment of unsuspected lightheadedness, and he can’t really bring himself to reply. Not at first.

“No, well,” Jon says. “No, I guess not.”

They lapse into silence, and Jon follows Oliver’s lead as he closes his eyes again. The ground is uncomfortable—several hard rocks dig into his back and his neck, and dark history radiates up from the earth and tries to settle behind Jon’s eyelids, tries to _show_ him exactly what could scorch the earth at the end of the world. But somehow, he holds it back, just on the edge of his awareness. When Jon thinks back on that moment, he swears he remembers falling asleep.

*

Very little about the beginning of the universe holds interest to Jon. He watches it stumble in its infancy: swirling new particles of potential forced into a physics as arbitrary as it is accidental. They are not alive; not really and not at all. But there is a strange vitality to it all, to existence learning the basic steps once again. A dance, almost, with Jon as its only audience.

This is nothing Jon had known before; there was nothing to _take_ this knowledge _from_. But at some point, in the pause between his molecules dissolving and their gentle, upsetting reformation, any latent power that the threat and promise of knowledge held over Jon experienced its own quiet death.

So, instead, he watches with a sort of blunt incuriosity, noticing the slow, languid pace the universe was content with to get itself started. Jon doesn’t try to interfere, not now, unsure even how he could and mutely terrified he could knock the whole of _everything_ off course simply by making an attempt. Putter the universe back out into nothing as surely as it found itself again.

The first one he becomes aware of is the spider. The Web? The universe strands together somehow, and from it the notion of the ever-connected winks into existence. Not as it was before, or at least not yet; it has no color, no shape, no real hum that drives the machines or Mother that spins the webs. It’s just an… acknowledgment, a placeholder for a concept. The knowledge that one can look out and see it all and know it is connected, however hidden the strings may be.

Jon supposes if he had been asked, been told to make a prediction, he would have guessed first the presence of the Vast. But even though he feels the same—like himself? And what is that, exactly?—he knows he is different. Space, distance; these things mean very little to him now, and he finds it difficult to conceptualize them in any concrete terms.

He could recite all the different measurements of distance, their conversions, and even their (old? forgotten?) history, but to try to apply this knowledge to anything he now experiences leaves him hazy, fraying at the edges and dissolving. At one point, he turns his attention to a little particle. Not even a speck of a thought of a something, and just tries to _locate_ it. Place it on a physical plane in relation to himself.

It’s a sickening freefall of losing all sense of awareness that knocks Jon from his own consciousness, dislocating him from his own dislocation. Something akin to him exists in, and of, and about, the universe, but he could tell you nothing of it.

For a time, Jon loses himself once more. He does not know how to explain the leaving or coming back. There is neither the gentle consciousness of waking from a forgotten dream nor the sickening jolt of bursting from a repeated nightmare. Rather, sometimes Jon feels that he _is_ , and just as often, given the chance to compare, he would say that other times he simply _is not_ —though the space of him is still present, still there, still the silent confidant of the universe. Jon comes to think of himself as liminal in his existence, recognizing in it something of the paradox of the universe itself, and Jon accepts it with the acknowledgment that he is not human, not avatar, not god, and not dead. Not anything he can explain at all.

And still, despite Jon’s own stagnate and stupefied existence, things are beginning to happen. Jon sees his first stars, here, in this new _something_. And they are beautiful, and terrifying, and wretched, and wrong. Ugly contortions of a familiar cosmos that Jon only remembers he forgot when he sees these impossible imitators. Sickened and alone, confused and melancholy, Jon finds the threadbare edge of his existence and lets himself slip off.

*

When Jon wakes up, when he _remembers_ waking up, it is not Oliver there but Tim. Tim who is frowning, and glaring, and sat up and hunched in on himself—the same sight of rage and unforgiveness that Jon remembers from the day Tim died.

Tim notices Jon’s new awareness immediately and begins: “He was never not dead. Oliver. Whatever marbles you had left Jon,” Tim says, cutting, “you’ve certainly lost them now.”

Jon is taken aback much like before and tries to decide if he thinks this is true. The Tim in front of him shivers with rage but nothing that feels like unreality. And yet. Jon knows, he _knows_ the truth, but something in him still almost wants to reach out to touch. To confirm his disappointment or surprise himself into elation. 

“Hallucinations…” Jon considers aloud, and the thought doesn’t terrify him like he knows it once would have. Maybe this is what they mean by _learning to adjust_. “They’ve never really been my particular brand of losing it, Tim.”

“Oh,” Tim smirks, and for some reason, this holds a little less edge. “So this feels a situation where we can depend on historical precedence?”

Glaring lightly at Tim, Jon chooses not to reply, waiting. Observing?

“Besides,” Tim finally continues, “We both _know_ I already kicked it. So, you don’t really have a lot going for you right now.”

“Might as well just accept it?” Jon questions, maybe to himself or maybe to Tim. Then huffs lightly at the distinction.

“Well,” Tim replies, “does it really matter?”

And Jon supposes he’s starting to see the pattern, here.

*

Jon spends a long, quiet, indeterminate amount of time merely slipping in and out, stuck between a bizarre comfort as things _continue_ , even without him, and the nauseating certainty that something is also _waiting_ for him. To do something? To be something?

These things become more difficult to conceptualize, and Jon feels himself fray and leech outward, stitching himself into the fabric of existence with a patient, careful hand. Jon tries to hold onto something—anything—concrete that feels like him. But he finds it increasingly difficult to decide what that means, and he loses himself one day—winks right out of consciousness, cast off from sentience for some unknowable length of time—merely trying to call forth his own name.

When he returns, somehow he can feel the heavy, familiar presence of exhaustion, pressing in on his mind from all sides. _No_ , Jon thinks belatedly, _nothing like waking up at all_.

And as Jon watches the universe grow and the Web knit it together, creating causality and connections out of disassociations and detachment, an empty pit settles itself somewhere in Jon, nested between his confusion and his exhaustion. It’s not… like him; there’s no consciousness, even if Jon himself feels his hold over that is becoming tenuous at best. No identity. No accidental carryover from something that no longer exists.

There are others: the Vast finally encroaches upon Jon’s awareness; the Stranger in the celestial bodies that just don’t quite strike him as stars. But they are all the same: inert, unconscious, unbeings. And Jon knows he has little to fear, so they are not even that.

Just forces. Some cousins to the even more mundane gravity. Some internal logic to the universe not yet granted the chance to become malevolent. It strikes Jon with the first true pang of loneliness since his death, and in a sudden rush he misses—

Well, he misses a lot.

*

Can you be depressed, alone, after the end of the world?

“I’m not sure,” Naomi Herne answers his unasked question. Jon smiles minutely, if only because Naomi is one of his favorites. “These things inspire much more terror in me than they do philosophy, personally.”

“I guess I can’t help eventually veering toward the existential,” Jon replies with a sigh. “Can you be depressed if there really is no prospect of a better life?”

Naomi side-eyes him and gives a small, discontented frown. “Yes, I think we’re all aware of this as a problem of existence.”

Jon winces slightly, chastised, and takes a brief moment to marvel at Naomi’s ability to cut directly to the heart of things while avoiding any social directness. She looks away and speaks in generalities or, if not that, then with a vague introspection. He’s not even sure she’s ever said his name, and Jon wonders if she could even bridge that expanse anymore and enter into the intimacy of direct address.

“Yes, well.” Jon continues, “I guess I’m just saying I’m not really sure what to do at this point. I think given the chance, I’d just lay down and die, but I’m certain I don’t have that luxury.”

Naomi gives a slight frown of agreement, and that’s all the confirmation Jon really needs.

“I think. It’s just—” Naomi starts, and then stops. It looks like she’s having some sort of difficulty trying to put her thoughts together or maybe force them out.

It puts Jon on edge, and he has a brief flash of longing, wishing he could peer into her skull and scoop out her thoughts, take them before she could force them on him unwillingly. It is a burning, nauseating instance where he knows he would if it were possible. But Naomi’s dead and this is not real—she is not real—and Jon does not know how to give or take or forget or compel knowledge from himself. Not in this way.

“It’s just,” Naomi eventually grits out, trying for all she can. “Don’t you think it’d help if you just talked about him? Maybe even just a little? Like what happened—”

“No.” Jon replies instantly, cutting her off. And they are still on that scorched and scarred hill, a permanent blow to the world even the Eye cannot remake in its image. And Jon looks down at the ugly, screaming earth that he will not listen to and away from Naomi, even though for once he can feel her own eyes on him. “Not at all.”

She doesn’t reply, and when Jon finally looks up, he is not surprised to find her gone.

*

It is when Jon watches the first star die an exploding, mesmerizing death that something gasping and panicked and achingly _human_ gurgles up from inside him—A body? Does he have a body? How had he not considered this before? The question alone makes Jon a little woozy.

The bored, miasmic fog that had settled over him expands and collapses, and something dislodges in Jon and then crashes back into him as his whole being ignites at the spectacle.

Jon does not merely watch but experiences and is, for a moment, transported back to that hot-white moment of everything and nothing at the end of his old and now unreal universe. He aches as the star ruptures into a white forever-nothing and then again as it collapses into the universe’s first nightmare. It is an eternity, and it is an instant, and it settles somewhere in Jon between lungs he had forgotten and ribs he had traded away.

For some intermediate amount of time, Jon cannot look away. He cannot see the collapsed singularity so much as feel it, and it thrums with the inverse beat of life, with the soft sigh of the eternal-oblivion. The star—originally a massive, glowing thing of eruptive, effusive energy—takes its true form as a quiet, wandering point of no return; the end itself. In the lonely early machinations of a dusty and dim universe, Jon’s chest aches with shared recognition. Here at the beginning, they exist as the end together.

The Dark—a contradictory thing, a comparative truth—is born out of the brightest light of the heavens, but Jon cannot care about that. For a moment, it even disgusts him. The Dark is merely an afterthought or a preview, an understudy or a reject.

Because as Jon stares at the universe’s first black hole, the universe’s first death and its first grave, he can hear the way it hums for him, the way he knows it belongs to him. And he can only think _Terminus._

The universe has born again, and Jon heralds it in with the knowledge of its own ending. Death itself. Sick and elated, terrified and certain, panicked and receiving, for the first time in a long while, Jon begins to understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the author can have a little light oliver/jon friendship... as a treat...
> 
> kodus and comments appreciated


	3. chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finished a bit early this week. might changes updates to sunday regardless going forward
> 
> enjoy!

When Annabelle comes to visit, it causes a putrid sort of shame to rise up in Jon’s throat like old bile. He tries to comprehend the exact manner of her arrival, something of a reverse vanishing and something of a nimble dance, and he cannot help but to see in her his mocking inverse.

The contrast is sharp. Her grace against his fumbling; her bright adapting where Jon couldn’t help but to stumble. Whereas every step taken and inch of ground strenuously maintained from the last years felt like a painful peeling and rearranging, sawing and sanding himself down, Annabelle appears to have come into her own as an avatar the moment she was chosen for it. Jon might as well be the Eye—its most concrete, physical manifestation—but he had to be carved for it. An ever-ongoing operation of amputations and unnatural graftings. Annabelle was born of the Web and into it, and the ease at which she holds herself in this world suggests an unearned effortlessness even if Jon knows more of power.

“A bit strange, Archivist,” Annabel says and does not continue. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Jon grits out and does not look at her, keeps his eyes carefully on his own hands.

Annabelle lets out an unhurried laugh, and Jon watches her stand gracefully from the corner of his eye. She steps forward and leans over Jon, somehow blocking out the Eye overhead as she gives Jon a playful smile from above. Her eyes aren’t unkind, not exactly, but they reflect light unnaturally, shielding something of herself from him.

“You’re going to have to stop standing in your own way at some point, Jon,” she says in a rare moment of candor. “In here,” she taps on her own head, right next to the cobweb, “and out here, as well,” finishing with a dramatic flourish of her arm outward.

Jon can’t decide if after that she actually leaves and walks away, or maybe just disappears. Or maybe just like the lighter, his mind slips off and away from her the moment she chooses for him to do so.

It is strange, though. And she is right, unfortunately. Jon thinks of how determined his mind is to construct the same social sphere—all its hostilities and repugnancies included—all alone at the end of the world. After a moment, he stands up and peers down at his hill. It… reaches for him, from a boarded corner in the back of his mind, but Jon has better learned how to engineer a careful blankness. A reflective nothing in place of where knowledge wants to settle it. Still, it is not perfect, and he cannot help the ways the earth seeps in regardless.

It’s not rotting; not exactly. More like fading, dissolving, or gently decomposing. Decaying from the inside out without any fungal assistance. It’s a blight, Jon thinks (knows?), though he’s not sure what to make of it. Not sure there’s anyone left alive who would.

*

In something of a return to form, Jon contents himself for the next few millennia to just watch. Time is different here. Now? Though, Jon considers, maybe it’s just him.

He keeps from losing himself, at least he believes he does. Cannot catch it anymore if he does occasionally fall off or fade away. There’s no real reference, nothing to count accurately against as everything shifts into place billions of years before and after Jon can even pluck out the memory of a scrap of knowledge that might help locate himself more precisely in the moment.

But time glides syrup smooth, sweet to move through and easy to over-indulge. Eons are by in an instant and Jon stretches the milliseconds of a dying cosmic formation into its own epoch. Death, Jon supposes, is the original eternal march, and so he allows himself to set the pace. And, somehow even more miraculously, he allows himself to enjoy.

It is a languid, measured sort of pleasure. Sometimes the ethereal presence of a brilliant celestial monument brings Jon only the cool contentment of knowing one day it will be his and all the more beautiful for it. And the cataclysmic shift from unliving to dead grants Jon the only thing resembling recognition, here in this earie new existence, and so it is difficult not to give himself these comforts. These moments of pseudo-companionable peace.

Briefly, sometimes, Jon will manage to think back to his own first death. The memory wears an awkward haze, a stifling fog that radiates outward and across all his memories from before Elias had Jon break the world. (Though, even those after, save his bright, searing second death, begin to feel further, less connected. They are still there, in a way, but sometimes he catches himself thinking are they even his, anymore?)

But still, that noncommittal venture right up to the very edges of the End, grazing along it like light on the edge of the event horizon of a black hole; it is sometimes impossible not to recall. His clumsy sputtering out after a pathetic attempt to save the world with half-known knowledge. It fills Jon with an awkward sort of feigned longing for the finite, the firmness of mortality. But more so, he begins to view it in light of that certain transformative dimension of Death—if one somehow manages to evade the steady promise of annihilation—a definitive shift to the something-else, the not quite known and the Other. Watching a nebula collapse, Jon finds it beautiful. He has not forgotten so much that he cannot recall his own experiences as soaked in terror.

It remains an ugly memory for Jon, when he can recall it with any precision. On rare occasions, Jon apprehends his old life with such excruciating clarity, recollecting the repeated futility he engaged in as though a vocation, that he can do little more than resign himself to its scarred and searing rawness.

And yet. More and more frequently, Jon finds himself caught in a mutual, painful peace with something near dead but never quite alive, and he sees in these immense cosmic creatures something of himself in the crucial moment when they rupture and reform.

*

Jon remembers experimenting, in a way. Stopping breathing, just to check. He exhaled a shaky indifference and let himself languish in its absence, counting the seconds up towards eternity in his head. Jon only found himself gasping again from the mental discomfort the ability evoked. He was well into the thousands, and his desperate attempt to choke back down some concrete grasp of humanity could not assuage the dread nurtured through each inch of time forward as it became more and more apparent how little such things belonged to him anymore.

He knew, of course, had known for a while; human, in the physical sense, was not anything he could make claim to anymore. But the knowledge sat like a sting behind the eyes or caught like a lump in the throat. It intruded upon Jon, his own inhumanity, and how could he not prod that monster within?

Regardless, Jon finds himself unable to let go of the trappings of a fragile mortality, and he carries a worn backpack with a scattering of unnecessary or insignificant supplies; things that mean nothing when the sky bleeds black-crimson and the earth throbs in a mouthless scream but which he cannot abandon regardless. Somehow, Jon puts together the facsimile of the pilgrim in his attempt to assign something like meaning to action. Somehow, he breathes in deeply and pretends it feels like a relief. Somehow, he keeps walking.

“Hilltop road, I think, doesn’t actually matter,” Jon says aloud, trying not to slow or still his pace as he waits for a reply. “Or at least I’m ready to resign it as my particular problem.”

“Yeah? And why is that?”

Basira. Somewhat predicable, he decides, but a solid choice. Right now, Jon just needs someone with a good head on her shoulders, he supposes.

Though, Jon thinks, looking back at her, and he’s imagined her tired, dirty—like him. He had known her before the permanent mark of exhaustion in the line of her shoulders or the tight dread at the corner of her mouth. But this is still the version he gave himself, the version that knew him best. He knew he pretty well, too, at least by the end.

And maybe, he thinks, maybe this is the Basira he misses the most, then. The one that settles a sick dread in him to see. It’s a hard realization to swallow, not because Jon was unaware of the raw abscess of forced absence, but because there is nothing for it. It gets stuck somewhere above his heart and near his lungs and doesn’t dislodge itself, missing someone standing right before him. It gives each breath the shadow of a painful edge, and Jon does not know what to do with the throb of comfort that evokes—the direct physical proof of his emotional state.

“Well, whatever was supposed to happen up there didn’t, right?” Jon asks, “Or, maybe,” he considers. “Maybe it did. But not the way it should have, right?”

“So, a bust either way?”

‘Exactly,” Jon agrees. “But I think the effort… the attempt. Whatever was holding that rift up, keeping the wound open… It collapsed.”

“So?” Barisa asks, a simple no-nonsense look on her face that tells Jon to quit the metaphors and cut to the chase.

“Well, now.” Jon pauses, bites his lip. Fiddles with the backpack strap. He’s not sure why this is making him nervous, but the stalling settles him a bit. “Well, now it’s either a scar or some sort of… tumor, maybe. A sore. Either it’s inert or malignant. It spreads or it doesn’t.”

Basira raises her eyebrows, and Jon tries not to think about what that means in the broader context of what this conversation actually is, how much he’s externalized this self-dialectic. “Spreads?”

Jon frowns, glances over his shoulder before returning his gaze to meet Basira’s.

“It’s—I caught a glimpse of it. Honestly, I just wasn’t willing to look at it fully. But still, there’s something…” Jon pauses, mulling over his word choice. “Diseased about it. Unhealthy? It’s not just damaged. It’s dying.”

Basira pauses in unhappy silence. “And so you left it?”

“What is there for me to, exactly?” Jon tosses back forcefully. “I tired saving the world, what? Twice? Three times? And what’s there to show for it? It either didn’t work or didn’t even matter.”

Basira forgoes replying, but (to Jon’s relief) she does not leave either. They walk together, heavy and mute, until Jon decides he wants to stop for a while. Day, night; they still mean little now. And lately, Jon has felt the Eye tracking him, gaze high and tight on the back of his neck no matter the color of the sky. Still…

“Do you sleep?” Basira asks, watching Jon unceremoniously drop his bag to ground before following it in his own exhausted collapse shortly after.

“It’s hard to say,” Jon replies. “Ever since, well—. Maybe not sleep exactly; maybe just. Inertness. Unaware.”

Basira gives a soft smirk. “But it’s something?”

“Exactly.” Jon replies, though he fails to mention the dreams. Why bother?

*

Right on the cusp of the universe—edging up against something that could be called a void or maybe even something less than that—there exists the dead echo of a massive star that collapsed into the muted form of a neutron star. It is malformed and ugly, an almost undead capitulation to its own destruction as a sort of underwhelming lack. It could not survive, not as it was, but its death reduces it down into the universe’s dull litter.

And although Jon can look at it and feel the lingering resonance of its sad, cosmic whimper into this celestial dilapidation, it is also new to him. The realization settles low in Jon’s being like a cold stone, almost like looking at one’s palm and being apprehended by some new feature, perhaps a break in a lifeline once thought so secure.

The dawning understanding that there are things that will die in the universe without him ever having known about their existence at all, not until it is already over and maybe not even then, it fills Jon with a miasmic sort of dread that clings to him, gives him a heavy, second shadow. It fills unknown hollows in Jon and poisons his being like lead. It is miserable, Jon decides, this slouching toward eternity through empty time and barren space. Maybe, he entertains bitterly, maybe this is just hell.

Even more, Jon almost surprises himself and finds that he mourns. How, he vaguely wonders, can these things that are his—that are him—transpire without him? Without him knowing? How is it that Death itself is a lonely existence?

*

“Would you have ever forgiven me, do you think, if you have lived?”

Tim snorts and tosses a branch he’d been holding as a walking stick, arching it high above their heads and drawing both of their attention as it falls. It shimmers into a limb and then back into a branch, hitting the ground with an almost wet thud that resembles neither at all.

“Oh, real nice,” Tim replies with less acid than Jon expected, but more than he hoped. He’s all tense lines and strained energy, and he glares at Jon in an unsettling mix of derision and, to Jon’s surprise, pity. “You just. What? Use your hallucinations of me to rid yourself of the guilt of how you wrecked my life?”

Jon frowns, thinking that’s a bit unfair.

“Or maybe you didn’t wreck it.” Tom continues, side-eying Jon’s expression, “But I was your friend, Jon. Yours. Even when you were just an insecure ass taking it out on any undeserving target you could find. And what did I get for that? No. You don’t get to just—absolve yourself of this.”

Jon sighs. “I didn’t—I don’t. You know that isn’t how this feels to me.”

And try though he might to change it, Jon knows his words are true. Jon knows he’s trapping himself in the double bind of loneliness and anguish, torture and disappointment, but looking at Tim, Jon just sees… Tim. It makes Jon’s chest tight, how much he misses what is and isn’t right in front of him, and it scares Jon, too. Because eventually Tim will leave, and then maybe he won’t come back. Perhaps no one will at all. The thought slides uneasily out of Jon’s mind to rest like a dissecting gaze on the back on his neck, and there is a strained certainty in Jon that this particular torment is neither entirely of his own doing or entirely for his own sake.

Jon shakes himself out of such thoughts and looks back again at Tim, but Jon knows his own expression still carries his anxieties—and his sorrow. Jon watches as the other man’s shoulders drop slightly, and Tim’s body sags in a moment of exhausted truce. Still, he glances out of the corner of his eye at Jon, saying, not unfairly, but not gently either, “But you know it isn’t real.” Tim pauses. “And you know this could get worse. You know how this could just worse.”

Jon swallows, feels the ever-present absence neither can mention fill the space between them. Jon’s phantom limb, his most sacred wound. Feels it begin to suffocate them both. “Yes.” Jon nods. “I do.”

*

There is a horrifying moment when Jon turns his awareness to the first inkling of the impression of life in the universe, and he annihilates it through the accident of his full attention. His unexpected excitement, his human joy, his easy recognition masquerading as love; it overwhelms a pre-life proto-bacterium and hurls the universe back into an abiotic barrenness.

Jon acquires the gut-wrenching truth of the fragility of life confronted with death, an old reminder that life squirms in delicate and accidental anomaly. Its death is nothing, Jon realizes in a nauseating clarity, like the eerie, mesmerizing metamorphosis of an unliving death, but rather the painful rupture toward nothing. An irreversible ceasing that Jon somehow picks up and puts inside himself. It is a new and unfamiliar kind of pain, more like the jagged edges of non-existence rubbing up against his own liminal and paradoxical core, but Jon cannot think of anything to do except to take this scraping hurt as his to carry.

*

Oliver, Jon thinks, carries the natural grace of the end of everything on himself like an easy ache.

“Quite the poet,” Oliver muses lightly with a slight quirk of the lips. “I’m deciding if I should be flattered or not.”

“You should,” Jon replies, temporarily just as weightless, and feels as a sad sort of contentment at the relaxed camaraderie he feels for the conjured dead man he barely knew in life. Jon gives Oliver his own small half-smile. “I’m actually quite jealous.”

“Never met a cross you couldn’t bring yourself to not bear?” Teasing and serious, light and probing.

“Is it bearing crosses?” Jon asks. “Do you feel presence of a latent salvation?”

Oliver doesn’t reply, and Jon continues: “No, it’s more like… a collection of shared wounds. Maybe this pain is collective, but the body is mine.”

Oliver frowns faintly, an unhappy crease forming between his eyes. Still, he remains quiet, almost thoughtful.

“And everyone else,” Jon can’t help himself; it just starts pouring out. “Well, everyone else. They at least get to die. I’m just—. In their wake, I suppose. And the wounds still throb.”

Oliver sighs, and finally asks, “So that’s it, then? That’s what’s actually bothering you.”

“It’s dead, Oliver,” Jon says softly. “Or dying. Can’t you feel it? It’s… empty. Emptying.”

Oliver makes a quiet thinking noise, not yet speaking but letting Jon know he plans to reply.

“Is that so unusual?” Oliver eventually rejoins. “We knew this would happen. Terminus takes all, in the end.”

Jon lets out a short huff of frustration. “Yes… maybe. I’m not sure. It feels. Off. Strange? This shouldn’t be happening so soon. Or, at least—at least I didn’t think it would. And it’s not just the people, I don’t think, it’s. Well.”

Oliver’s eyes have greyed significantly since he and Jon last met. It makes Jon fidget uncomfortably for a moment when their eyes meet, as Jon cannot quite decide what it says about him or Oliver or his perception of either.

“Can the world die again, Oliver?” Jon finally asks. “Is that my cross, too?”

“Your wound?” They share a significant look at the echoed implications, but neither seem particularly determined to continue the line of thought to its natural conclusion.

Jon huffs unhappily and changes the subject. “I know I—Well, I know I probably… talk,” Jon chooses the most innocuous verb for what this all exist is, “too much to you.”

Oliver gives Jon a sad and almost warm look, an acknowledgment of a shared melancholy. Jon is reminded of Oliver’s own troubled avatarhood, his own lot of the world’s grief.

“I think I just—” Jon starts and then stops. Starts again, “It’s easiest with you.”

“We never really hurt each other?”

“And were never really friends,” Jon finishes with a grimace. There’s a lot less history to choke on, he wants to add, but instead leaves it unspoken. He knows it is understood.

“And then there’s also the End,” Oliver adds, unwilling to let some difficult things go unsaid. “I’m sure it’s easier to pretend I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of real.”

“Yes, well.” Jon allows himself a sardonic twist of the lips. “I guess you make me feel a little less crazy, too.”

“A relative concept, these days,” Oliver replies.

“Things…” Jon begins. “Well, they start to feel a lot less relative when you find yourself as the only other model for comparison.”

They lapse into silence again, and Oliver looks more pensive than before. The deep worry-lines that already marred his face grow deeper as he appears to lose himself in thought.

The implication makes Jon briefly hum with grotesque, curious impulse, and for a moment Jon is certain he would peel back Oliver’s skin if only to create a mirror for himself. A ghastly reproduction masquerading as reflection.

*

Jon becomes careful, weary. Unsure where to settle his gaze and certainly not willing to consider the vague swirling plot of dust and potential that he feels as where the Earth will eventually come to be. It is a different way of knowing than with the Eye, and that old knowledge—that unreachable everything—Jon feels it slowly seeping out of him regardless.

Instead, he can sense the embryonic echo of death through the potential of life concentrated into something like a conceptualization of concrete space he can finally perceive. Jon’s spatial awareness, he realizes, ties itself his ability to locate spaces as secondary to their time. And Jon only knows time through death.

This leaves Jon in a tense standoff, caught between his natural desire to imbricate himself into the fabric of the universe as it pulses its way towards the excruciating inevitable ending already once seared into Jon’s mind and the deep understanding that he has been confined into this position of solitary, absolute judgement. And how could he not writhe at the thought of another coerced role, another forced hand?

But even more than that, sometimes, so infrequently so as to make Jon all but forget in the interims, Jon relocates the presence of a memory of the small, human things that used to make him ache with warmth. And in these lost moments, Jon sometimes can call forth enough to allow the fleeting sensation of the soft impression of an earnest palm pressed into his own, gentle and easy, and it guide him toward the edge and off the precipice of consciousness. This is a simple kind of falling.

*

He and Daisy rarely speak, though they share nods and glances easy enough. Jon thinks they both realize to speak would be to breach the carefully maintained edges of their own relational excess. There is too much to say, and nothing that could really be said. Their history is tense like a wire, and they walk it as cautiously as it deserves.

Still, they walk together in a way that suggests how much they understand each other’s presence despite this. Even if there were words, there would be no need to speak regardless, both of them entuned to vague notion of the same veiled destination and an unexpressed need to get there.

And when the travel starts to hurt—to burn, almost, like gasping for air without any relief—as it now often does, Daisy’s quiet, solid presence fortifies Jon to continue forward.

*

Strangely, he knows, it is while watching the slow dance of the Andromeda galaxy come together that Jon allows himself to finally think of Martin.

Martin. Just the name, really, at first. Just a small reflection of the surface of an ocean Jon keeps locked deep in the marrow of cracked flesh and bruised bones. It hollows him out, just the word, just the suggestion of it all.

Ethereal dust and irradiated potential swirl around in the unliving and unwavering intimacy of the substances of universe drawn to each other irrespective of their own insentience. It is with this same sort of inexplicable magnetic longing—the same sort of unshakable, binding pull—that Jon thinks of Martin, as if time and space or living and dead have no bearing on his ability to reach out toward the other man and simply take his hand again.

It is a little fantasy of hopeless unreality, he knows, but the impotent desire, its warm and wonderful glow; it holds Jon all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, i hope you all are enjoying this <3 (minor spoilers) things start to pick up for jon's "new" timeline in the next chapter, which i'm excited for myself :)


End file.
